As the technological capacity for organizations to create, track, and retain information continues to grow, a variety of different technologies for managing and storing the rising tide of information have been developed. Database systems, for example, provide clients with many different specialized or customized configurations of hardware and software to manage stored information. However, the increasing amounts of data organizations must store and manage often correspondingly increases both the size and complexity of data storage and management technologies, like database systems, which in turn escalate the cost of maintaining the information. New technologies more and more seek to reduce both the complexity and storage requirements of maintaining data while simultaneously improving the efficiency of data storage and data management.
One such technology involves modifying the orientation or arrangement of data as it is stored in a database table using a column oriented database table (often referred to as “columnar”) to reduce the number of access operations required to manage it. Typically, access operations, such as various inputs (e.g., writing data) and output (e.g., reading data), prove to be the most costly and least efficient when storing and managing data. Columnar databases may for certain types of data drastically reduce the number of access operations, when, for instance, the database system is responding to a query for information that occurs predominately in a column of a database table rather than a row of a database table. Yet, even with the advent of technologies such as columnar database tables, the continued growth of collected information requires further optimizations for the storage and management of data.
While embodiments are described herein by way of example for several embodiments and illustrative drawings, those skilled in the art will recognize that embodiments are not limited to the embodiments or drawings described. It should be understood, that the drawings and detailed description thereto are not intended to limit embodiments to the particular form disclosed, but on the contrary, the intention is to cover all modifications, equivalents and alternatives falling within the spirit and scope as defined by the appended claims. The headings used herein are for organizational purposes only and are not meant to be used to limit the scope of the description or the claims. As used throughout this application, the word “may” is used in a permissive sense (i.e., meaning having the potential to), rather than the mandatory sense (i.e., meaning must). Similarly, the words “include,” “including,” and “includes” mean including, but not limited to.